Banana Yoshimoto: The Premonition: heard on Audible

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay
Eccentric old house

I’m still new-fangled with this Audible book app. It told me I had a monthly credit to spend, so I had a look at the recommendations. Yoshimoto’s The Premonition sounded intriguing, from the blurb – and the cover art was attractive; proof that book design matters!

Had I walked into a bookshop and seen it, would I have bought it? I don’t know. I’d have been surrounded by appealing new titles, and I can’t say whether I’d have chosen this above all others. It’s quite short, compared to the other books I’ve listened to, and – frustratingly – it is not broken up into chapters. I find it easier to put a book down if I’ve come to a structural break.

It’s a strange, dreamlike book, set in or around Tokyo. It’s richly descriptive of its physical surroundings, but I got a bit tired of reading about Yayoi’s brother’s straight back, the set of his shoulders and the way he walked!

Yayoi, the heroine is paradoxically both clairvoyant after a fashion (the word ‘clairvoyant’ isn’t used, but what is a clairvoyant if not someone who has premonitions?) and amnesiac, having lost all childhood memories after a traumatic incident. She knows that there’s something she doesn’t know. She has two loving parents; a wonderful brother a couple of years younger than her, whom she adores; and a completely eccentric young aunt who lives alone in a ramshackle house, from which she somehow emerges sane and tidy enough to work as a school music teacher every day … except when it rains.

We never find out quite why the house has been allowed to become so dirty and run-down (was there no-one to help her learn how to run a home?); why the aunt never seems to cook proper meals; or why she seems so dreamy and other-wordly. It takes a while to work out why the heroine feels so drawn to her.

There are loose ends. What was the significance of the heroine intuiting that someone had killed a baby in the leaky bath of the temporary accomodation that her own family rented during a house renovation? This seems to be completely unrelated to anything else in the story. And why did the aunt not like going out in the rain? Most particularly, once the heroine had worked out her real relationships to her brother and aunt, you’re left wondering why she hadn’t been told before.

Japanese mountain volcano peak
Image by kimura2 from Pixabay

At the end of the novel, Yayoi has pieced together the story, with the help of her aunt/sister. But what will become of the changed relationship with her brother? And how will the aunt/sister resume a romantic relationship with another young man, who had until recently been a classroom pupil? From a British vantage-point, all I could think about was child protection policies, ethical breaches and the involvement of social services, the teaching council and potentially the police. My knowledge of Japanese culture is so minimal that I don’t know if such a situation would be viewed differently there.

Discovering the truth may not make things any easier

So, if I had to summarise the book in one line, it would be this:- ‘Discovering the truth may not make things any easier.’

I’m not sure what I’ll read next, but perhaps I’ll opt for something a little more conventional!

So he played the Banjo …

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

I researched flautist James Simpson, the father of Dundonian music publisher and seller Alexander Simpson, for some months  before starting my PhD.   In the mid-1800s, Alexander Simpson became a partner in Methven Simpson, which had stores in Dundee, St Andrews, Forfar and Edinburgh.

I was unaware of any links with musicsellers or publishers in Glasgow, but you can’t blame me for getting excited when I found out about Frank Simpson’s shop in Sauchiehall Street, a couple of years ago.  Indeed, there was another Frank Simpson selling music elsewhere in Glasgow at the start of the twentieth century.

Let me save you a long story.  The Sauchiehall Street Simpson established his shop in 1860 – not much later than Alexander Simpson’s early career in Dundee – and I wasn’t aware of Alexander having any brothers, or of the family having a Glasgow connection at all.  The low premises on the left-hand side of the postcard foreground (above) are the shop the older Frank Simpson later settled in, with the shop remaining there for well over a half-century.  Frank Simpson junior eventually joined him, importing banjos from S S Stewart in the USA, and teaching the instrument from the premises from the mid 1880s onwards.  The other Simpson was a competitor, no connection with the Sauchiehall Simpsons (as their adverts make amply clear!), and it seems there was no connection with Methven Simpson.

However, this apparent dead end may not be a complete cul-de-sac, since the Sauchiehall Street shop was demolished to make way for British Home Stores circa 1964, and the owner by that time was a famous singer of Scottish repertoire.  I believe the shop was subsequently combined with a couple of others, ultimately to form the Glasgow Music Centre, so … taking the links back in time again … it all forms part of my present research interest in late Victorian and Edwardian Glasgow music publishers.  It just doesn’t connect with the Methven Simpson story.  So many Simpsons!

During my perigrinations through the British Newspaper Archive (a present to myself, half-subsidised by Mum’s Christmas gift!), I caught Frank Simpson junior playing his banjo at a “minstrel concert” in Milton of Campsie, and twice at a Sabbath School Soiree in Kilbarchan.  Frank Simpson cheap novel soldI discovered that Frank Simpson also published cheap novels, and (from an advertisement whose provenance was uncited) -that the shop sold books, jokes and greasepaint as well as the thousands of pieces of sheet-music that Glasgow Herald adverts boasted of.  Sadly, the British Library only seems to have five songs – but this material was not high art music, so there’s the possibility that it didn’t get logged in sufficient detail for me to be able to trace Frank Simpson’s imprint.

To date, the genealogical database Scotland’s People has not yielded the significant dates of   Sauchiehall Street Frank Simpson senior – I could still look harder –  but I do know that Simpson junior was born in Airdrie on 24th May 1866, and  died in East Kilbride on 14 August 1936 at the age of 70.  For now, I’m leaving them in limbo, since this is an intriguing but time-wasting detour away from the bigger questions about what the other, more active publishers were actually publishing!